On New Year’s Day 2005, millions of Britons watched as Dawn French, star of the popular sitcom “The Vicar of Dibley,” persuaded her friends to put on strange white armbands and join a protest march after watching an internet clip of distraught African children about to be orphaned by AIDS — because of a lack of drugs easily available in high-income countries.
The website was called makepovertyhistory.org and thus dawned, through a clever publicity coup by the show’s writer, anti-poverty activist Richard Curtis, a landmark year of soaring hope that it is possible to stamp out poverty, of growing confidence that politicians must and will act if put under pressure from a mass movement of ordinary people demanding to be heard.
Two decades on, some of the United Kingdom’s biggest aid organizations are preparing to mark the 20th anniversary of the Make Poverty History campaign and its extraordinary impact — and to find out if such ambition is still possible in today’s more cynical, conflict-strewn world.